Cesare Pavese, the writer who carried suicide like a curse

On the tombstone that remembers the writer Cesare PaveseIn the cemetery of Santo Stefano Belbo, his hometown, one of the last phrases of The craft of living –the diary in which, among many other matters, he ends up announcing the gesture final (that of his suicide): "I have given poetry to men." He gave it to them in verse and prosaic form, and made the effort – successful – to understand the human soul, even though he drowned in his own.

Pierre Adrian (1991) is in love with Pavesian literature, and this book is a clear example. Like Barnes, for example, he is in love with Flaubert's. The protagonist ofHotel Roma –in room 49 of this Turin establishment they found Pavese dead, intoxicated by pills, on August 27, 1950– continues a kind of search that recalls the one that the Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has applied to his books ("I was a fan of addresses and specific places"). quest Modiano's novel usually follows the trail of anonymous figures, while Adrian's follows the trail of a famous writer. The novel's protagonist and his girlfriend ("the dark-skinned girl") visit the Pavese sites in Turin, Santo Stefano Belbo, and Rome. And in Brancaleone (Calabria), where the author of Working is tiring He was confined for seven months for his lack of political commitment. They're lucky (or not) that the Italian never left his country. They visit places, want to set foot in them, touch them: there's a deep admiration.

An irredeemable individualist thirsty for love.

Pavese's prominence dwarfs that of the couple. To the point that there are passages where I would have asked for more information about this devoted follower of the poet who knows how to infect the dark-skinned girl with his fascination. The revered image of Pavese also has to do, or above all, with his stubbornness as a lonely man, scorned by women. It's not that he didn't have romantic relationships, but all of them, without exception, ended badly (he was a real jerk). And yet, "his thirst for love was never quenched." Pavese's political counterpoint is found in Pasolini, who appears fleetingly in the novel. Or in some of those anonymous characters who teem within The History, by Elsa Morante, recently published in Catalan. Now, it is precisely in this unrepentant individualism that lies one of the charms of Adrian's Pavese—who, however, is not an unsupportive or selfish man. He was, above all, a tortured individual. And the narrator always reflects this: "A way of being in the world that concerned me. The temptation of isolation, the explosion, fatalism, insipidity, withering away, a discouragement, a kind of sloth, and a certain nihilism." Or more than "a certain nihilism," it is that he had always been attracted to the idea of deciding how to end his days ("Pavese carried suicide with him like a curse"). And it was, after all, when he had not yet reached the age of forty-two, coherent, that he carried it out.

The writer Ernesto Ferrero, a native of Turin like Pavese, born thirty years after him, shaped his illustrious precedent as a man in black and white. Pierre Adrian's main achievement was the coloring of the character. The tones are dark, muted, but deeply human. There are splendid pages, like the one in which he compares the writer to the cyclist Marco Pantani, who claimed he climbed so fast to mitigate suffering: "Wasn't writing quickly a way of escaping the pain?"